Welcome to the Arcade Heroes Year-In-Review of 2025, our annual rundown of arcade happenings across various bases. As well as the usual top 10 posts and content at the end of the post, here you will find our summaries of how things have gone for the site in general, a state of the business side, trade shows, new games and more. It’s been a mixed year overall with some downs, but also ups, so let’s take a look…
This article appeared in Make: Vol 94. Subscribe for more great projects. In 8th grade, Todd Moyer fell in love with making after combining a shop class assignment — a little gadget that varied a lightbulb’s voltage in response to audio signals — with his home stereo and some Christmas lights, turning his room into a disco club. “The exhilaration I felt was not just from pretty lights and music, but the feeling of empowerment that came...
Barring a last second announcement from anyone else, we appear to have our final arcade release of 2025. Alan-1 has begun shipping out the arcade version of Atari’s Gravitar: Recharged to interested parties. Let’s take a look.
Welcome to the last 2025 edition of Location Watch, a regular series here on Arcade Heroes that covers brand new arcade locations which have opened all over the planet. That has the caveat of only being locations we hear about, but thanks to various readers, our own research on social media, and other arcade news sites like RePlay Magazine and InterGame Online, we do our best at making it comprehensive. If you missed the news on our previous Location Watch posts...
At last fall’s Maker Faire Bay Area, Ben showcased the ‘Connect 4 Musical Instrument’. It is a twist on the classic strategy game, but this one plays music as you play the game. Ben shares how this project combined elements of game design, music technology, and interactive art. Ben showed us how his idea evolved from the question, “What if Connect 4 made music?” Transform it into a functional prototype. Ben’s simple yet complex system uses RFID sensors in the...
Twenty years ago, I wrote a column called “News from the Future” for the first issue of Make: magazine. I based it on the notion from science-fiction writer William Gibson that “The future is here. It’s just not evenly distributed yet.” Makers, hackers, hobbyists, and enthusiasts, I argued, are living in a future that we will all one day catch up to. The list of projects from early issues of Make: did indeed bring momentous news from the future. Drones,...
Arduino Team — December 28th, 2025 Every millennial knows the exhilarating feeling of going to the computer lab, booting up a Macintosh, and creating beautiful art in MacPaint. The nostalgia meter has broken its dial and is now spinning wildly. If you want to capture that nostalgia in a form suitable for home décor, you can build Mark Wilson’s fantastic LackPaint to display your photos like they’re in MacPaint. LackPaint is basically a digital photo...
Air Week: December 29, 2025-January 4, 2026
This article appeared in Make: Vol 94. Subscribe for more great projects. Over five decades ago, in 1973, DJ Kool Herc changed music forever by using two turntables, each playing the same record, with a mixer to switch between them, in order to extend percussion breaks indefinitely. In the 1980s the “failure” of Roland’s TR-808 to successfully emulate a real drummer was embraced by hiphop and techno pioneers who used its synthetic sound as the bedrock to...
Arduino Team — December 26th, 2025 Every year, some of YouTube’s most prolific makers get together to coordinate a Secret Santa exchange among themselves, then post videos of the results. The only rule is that they have to create the gifts. This year, Matty Benedetto (Unnecessary Inventions) got Austin Bradley in the exchange. For Bradley’s present, Benedetto constructed this set of digital calipers suitable for giants. These calipers may be huge, but they do the same...
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